The story of the internet, as told by Know Your Meme
Tales from the front line of meme documentation. As the Editor of Know Your Meme puts it, the internet is “kind of the anti-Bible. You learn everything terrible about human beings.”
Alan Rusbridger’s Guardian is on a suicide mission
There is more than a whiff of the hatchet job to the piece on The Guardian written by a self-described “friend of the paper” who has had a “falling out” with his erstwhile chum. There’s nothing like a bit of personal animosity to make for an interesting read. Beyond that though, it’s a case study of the dynamics of running one of the world’s largest media groups (and burning $45m a year in cash while doing so.).
The Eternal Return of Buzzfeed
This piece looks at what a highly successful, disruptive organisation like Buzzfeed can learn from its antecedents as disruptors, who are now part of the establishment it is taking on.
He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now HeÕs Worried About An Information Apocalypse.
A piece about warnings of an impending ÒinfocalypseÓ, as tools to falsify video footage, images and the writing of real people become ever more sophisticated, and our ability to control their proliferation remains essentially non-existent.
The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century
A detailed look at the birth and early childhood of the personal computer. http://www.bit.ly/arstechnica-ibm
Is Amazon getting too big?
A searching piece about Amazon and monopoly, published in a newspaper owned by Amazon’s CEO. If you have the time, it’s also worth dipping into the elegantly wrought 28,000 word ‘note’ in The Yale Law Journal that inspired the piece.
Palantir Knows Everything About You
An investigation into Peter Thiel’s data mining company reveals the extent of the surveillance done by government and corporate clients using their technology.
Why Amazon is eating the world
A look at the radical way in which Amazon is systematically turning each component of its business into an productised commercial venture with external clients – starting with their technology infrastructure, then their fulfillment service and so on. The objective goes beyond revenues and profit (though they come – Amazon Web Services has a $14bn annual run rate) to building a “moat” around their market position and ensuring that the pressure of servicing external clients keeps all units in Amazon lean and competitive.